In the fortified courtyard of Alderman Vance Corley’s river manor, eighty horses stood saddled in the darkness, their bits wrapped in greased rags to deaden the jingle of iron rings. The men standing beside the mounts were not town court guards or plantation guards. They were the Black Scythe Company. Hardened desert hired blades who had fought in the border skirmishes of the southern wastes.
They wore blackened iron cuirasses over greasy buff coats. Their boots were heavy with steel toe-caps, their faces obscured by black linen scarves. Across their saddles hung short-barreled wheel-lock hunting carbines, notched cutlasses, and bundles of dry ash torches soaked in pine pitch and sulfur.
Alderman Corley stood on the porch, his velvet coat dusted with road grime. He held a heavy iron strongbox upon an oak frame stand. His florid face was dark with desperation. His hand shook as he counted stacks of silver crowns onto the wood.
“The court sits in two days,” Corley whispered to Captain Vane Malakor, a scarred mercenary veteran with a missing left ear and cold, colorless eyes. “If that porter brings Caleb Thorne’s thick parchment rolls and the stone rubbings before the Circuit Judge, five merchant syndicates will be dismantled and my neck will be in a royal noose.”
